Curioblog; unusual gifts, gadgets
and curiosities blog

It has a sensor on its nose and, whenever it detects a coin, it moves its mouth to beg you for it. Push the dog’s tail to empty the piggy bank.

Mog Mog Wanco

There a thousands of piggy banks on earth, but when you get your hands one a doggie bank as cute as this one, you’ll just want to keep putting coins in it! It’s called "Mog Mog Wanco" by Bandai and its a little dog that seems to enjoy eating coins whenever you put one in.

This dog has a sensor in its nose, so when you come near it with a coin it starts moving its mouth as if he were begging you for it.

Muji Japan is selling a toy that you can use to create 3-dimensional paper shapes using colored Lego building blocks.

A cocodrile made with Muji x Lego

Everyone likes playing with Legos. They’re simple colored blocks, but you can use them to make thousands of different shapes. And wouldn’t it be all the more fun if you could decorate your works of Lego art with pieces of paper?

In keeping with its functional and minimalist style, Muji, the Japanese multinational brand that makes products for the home, has a great idea to help us enjoy Legos to the max.

With the crisis is making it hard to make ends meet, how can we possibly deal with Christmas? We’ll have to look for alternatives to avoid over-charging our credit cards. One idea that’s worked for us: turn the Secret Santa drawing into a contest. Whoever finds the best gift for the least money wins. We have some suggestions for cheap Christmas gifts for the rest of the family.

It looks like a shrimp fresh out of the sea, but it’s actually a very realistic-looking cell phone strap. It comes in two models: cooked and live.

Pichi pichi Ebi-san, cooked version

Fried shrimp are a favorite dish for many Japanese kids. I remember when I was a young girl, before I really knew anything about shrimp, I thought the tail was the head (see, in Japan, we remove the heads from shrimp before frying them).

Shrimp are a very common food in Japan, and, not surprisingly, a Japanese company has designed a cell phone strap that’s shaped like this little critter and is very realistic-looking.

Cardbo is one of the characters in the Yostuba manga comic. Its first-generation robot style and the friendly, startled look on its face have conquered the hearts of robot lovers.

A copy of Danbo

Its name is Danbo or Cardbo, (from the Japanese word "danboru", which means "cardboard") and it’s one of the lead characters in the manga series Yostuba, a cartoon that narrates the life of a 5-year-old girl with green hair who is full of energy and very curious.

Cardbo isn’t really a character, it’s actually a cardboard disguise that one of Yostuba’s schoolmates wears, although Yostuba thinks that it’s a real robot!

Micro Pets-i are animal-shaped Japanese mascots that move, sing and interact amongst themselves.

A dog, a panda bear, a cat... choose your favorite Micro Pet

There are many toys that look like pets, but they’d be a lot more fun if they also did whatever you ordered them to do. Takara Tomy’s Micro Pets-i are tiny robots that look like cute little animals. They first came out in 2002, and 10 million of them have already been sold, but now they’ve been re-launched on the market with a more intelligent strategy.

There are 9 different Micro Pets-i models and they each look like different animals: a dog, a cat, a panda bear, etc.

Otamatone is an instrument that’s shaped like a tadpole and you can use it to create melodies using different techniques. Learn to play it!

Otamatone

Otamatone is a very curious instrument. It looks like a cross between a musical note and a tadpole and when you slide your fingers down the staff, it plays music.

It’s a sort of theremin (one of the first electronic musical instruments), you have to push its tail a bit to make a sound. And, when you open and close its mouth, the Otamatone creates vibrant effects.

It looks like a toy, but if you practice enough you can actually play songs on it.

The first time we saw these video eyewear glasses on the Internet, we thought they were so modern and futuristic that we couldn’t wait to get them and try them out. Now we’ve finally tried them.

The package includes all this stuff

That’s right, we wanted to corroborate whether watching films and videos while wearing the "iWear AV230 XL" video eyewear glasses is really as comfortable as the photos lead you to believe. When we got them, they made a very good first impression. When we opened the package, we found the glasses were exactly like those featured in Vuzix’s ads.

Thanks to The Impossible Project, a web site dedicated to recuperating Polaroid, the legendary instant cameras will go back into production in 2010.

Celebration Pack, sold out within a few hours

The Impossible Project, that web site that has been trying to put Polaroid cameras back into circulation since 2008, has finally achieved its goal. The company that has the right to Polaroid is called Summit Global Group and, a few days ago, they held a press conference where they announced plans to start selling the instant cameras and their cartridges again in 2010.